We're with Nobody by Alan Huffman Page B

same overwatered philodendron in the corner, its leaves wilted and edged with brown; the now-familiar plate glass windows, through which a Chevy Citation with mismatched hubcaps is partially visible; and the notices of garage sales and informational meetings about hazardous waste disposal posted by the clerk’s window. It’s like being stuck in study hall with a math textbook as a kid, staring out the window at the passing clouds with a level of interest that grows in inverse proportion to the slowly suffocating tedium of the numbers. Meteorology—now that’s interesting! Except that there are no clouds visible through the window. It’s just me, the cop, the minutes and the senseless despair of a neglected plant. There are also, I note, spiderwebs in one corner, where the walls meet the water-stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling, and at one point I realize that the Citation has inexplicably disappeared! How could I have missed its departure?
    Before long, I’m spending most of my extracurricular time discreetly studying the cop, a stocky, youngish guy loaded down with crime-fighting appurtenances—a flashlight, a pistol, a radio, handcuffs and other curious, jangly things that on the occasion of our initial introduction I had been unable to adequately catalog without seeming suspiciously overinterested. I don’t know what it is about cops that makes me not want to seem suspicious when I’m doing nothing wrong. Why couldn’t I comfortably look over all the stuff hanging from his belt before we took our seats and the accoutrement disappeared beneath the table? Now I’m left only with occasional, furtive glances at his strangely placid face as he reads, at the radio mic pinned to his collar, at his name tag and his magazine, on the cover of which is a photo of a deer hunter encumbered with the gadgetry necessary for stalking and killing large herbivores.
    Unlike the clerk, the policeman doesn’t seem to care what I’m up to as we while away the hours in the foyer of the township office, a place you’d not likely visit unless you had a problem with a water main or a marriage license, or were, like me, secretly researching the mayor. Owing to the circumstances, I feel obliged to limit my occasional dialogue with him to small talk, mostly about deer hunting, which isn’t easy when you have never actually hunted a deer. I strive to keep my deer anecdotes geographically nonspecific, aside from referencing the deer I’d recently encountered while jogging in a wooded preserve alongside a highway interchange. It helps that the cop seems content to keep our official hookup anonymous, too. The conversational conclusion we will reach, over the course of the day, is that there are too many deer, everywhere.
    Midway through my review, after I’ve made no obvious moves to abscond with the minute books, the cop has become deeply engrossed in his latest hunting magazine and no longer looks up each time I tear tiny shreds of Post-it notes to mark pages in the record books for copying. Of particular interest to me are the notations recounting mayoral cameo appearances in the council minutes. Though the summaries are pretty general, and utterly devoid of conversational nuance, after the second reference I sense a pushiness on the mayor’s part as he urged the council to approve a contract for some infrastructure improvement. I can almost feel the electricity in the room as a certain council member, no doubt a perennial troublemaker who grows his own tomatoes, and talks about it, questioned whether the mayor’s recommended contractor was the best one for the job. I imagine the councilman raising one eyebrow as he spoke, eliciting an icy stare from the mayor, and I make a note to check the mayor’s campaign contributors to see if the contractor is listed among them.
    It’s at this point, pretty late in the day, that the stasis is broken by the arrival of an